


Corpus Scriptis

by hailtherandom



Series: Ficmas 2k14 [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Drawing, Fluff, Gen, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Some Canon-Typical Violence, Writing, Writing on Skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 04:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2758904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hailtherandom/pseuds/hailtherandom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“When I was younger,” Sam says. “I used to doodle on my hands with sharpies in class when I was bored. I always got in trouble for it. My mom said that I’d get ink poisoning if I kept it up.”</i><br/><i>“That’s not even real,” Natasha says. “No one gets ink poisoning from drawing on their hands with sharpie.”</i><br/> </p><p>Steve, Sam, and Natasha find solace in each other through the tip of a pen, because sometimes it's easier to write the things you want to say than to say the things you mean.</p><p>This is pure OT3 fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Corpus Scriptis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [series](https://archiveofourown.org/users/series/gifts).



> ~~Christmas~~ Hanukkah present for [series](http://superqueerpasta.tumblr.com)!
> 
> Partially inspired by [this fanart](http://pidgeyons.tumblr.com/post/86610067948/). Go check it out, it's pretty great.

It starts out of necessity, this thing they do together. It’s a move on pure tactical requirement, the first time in the field when Sam’s comm goes out and loses the rendezvous points. There are three of them and he only knows one, so he huddles behind a sheet metal wall at the first address, waiting for someone else to show up. That someone ends up being Natasha, tucking and rolling to land next to him, hair in her face and breathing heavily.

“Oh, good, I’m not the first here,” she pants, then raises her wrist to her mouth. “Falcon and Widow at rendezvous one.”

“Am I not on time?”

“No, you’re on time, but I had men on my six and I called in for backup.”

“There were men on your– shit!” Natasha ducks to the side with practiced ease and Sam finds his guns in his hands before he even has time to think about it. He takes out two - kicks one in the face and shoots the other through the thigh -  and Natasha downs one from under him. Then she stands up, straightens out and brushes dirt off her knees.

“Thanks, Wilson.”

“Maybe start with ‘there are three dudes following me’ next time?” Sam says. “Just a thought.”

Natasha shrugs. “I called in.”

Sam shakes his head. “My comm’s busted. I lost contact, don’t know where the next point is.”

“Shit. Okay.” Natasha reaches into one of her gun holsters and produces what looks like a pen. “Give me your arm.” She tugs his sleeve up and scribbles two addresses on his forearm. “We’re meeting on the roof of this building, and the back door of this one. Fourteen hundred and fourteen fifteen. Your watch still working?”

“Ha ha,” Sam says, resisting the urge to stick his tongue out at her. But they are professional Avengers doing some professional Avenging, so he just watches as she winks, tucks, and dives away from the steel wall, ducking into an alley and disappearing.

Thor shows up next and Sam takes his cue to tag out.

He ends up taking a knife to the arm later in a hand-to-hand battle, straight through the addresses. It bleeds a lot, but it’s fine, because Steve comes crashing around the corner and melee kicks the guy in the face and they hit the final point together. Sam presses the bottom of his undershirt to the gash during the debrief and gets stitches later. It’s fine. He’s used to it.

He forgets about the ink until a couple days later, when Steve is helping him take off the bandage to clean the stitches. Steve frowns, then twists his head to read the words. “Sam, why does your arm say ‘59 west 48th’ on it?”

Sam blinks. “Oh! That’s from the fight.”

“Wasn’t that one of our meet points?”

“Yeah, it was. Natasha wrote it, my comm went out and…” Sam trails off as Steve’s expression hardens.

“Your comm what.”

“Yeah, it shorted out. Pretty early on too.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone about it because…?”

“...Because my comm went out and how was I supposed to tell anyone?” Sam volunteers.

Steve glares at him but seems to concede the point. Instead, he grabs a cotton pad and wets it with some water and soap and starts cleaning at the edges of the stitches. “You gotta be more careful, Sam. Let someone know next time. It’s dangerous to be out there on your own.”

Sam winces as Steve catches the edge of a stitch. “I told Natasha.”

Steve’s mouth twists into something that looks like a smirk but doesn’t want to be. “Tell someone who believes in extraction plans.”

“Cap, yes, Cap,” Sam says, saluting with his left hand.

Steve wrinkles his nose, but ends up laughing anyway.

The _west 48th_ takes a week to fade.

~

The next time they go out, on a hunt for Bucky, Natasha pulls Sam to the side as they get out of the car. “Give me your arm.”

“What? Why?” Sam asks, pulling his sleeve up anyway. “It’s healing fine.”

“No, I just wanna…” Natasha takes a felt tip marker out of her pocket and draws a little doodle on the inside of Sam’s forearm.

Sam squints at it and recognizes it to be a building plan. “You think I’m gonna get lost?”

“Just in case your comm goes down again,” Natasha says. She pauses, then draws three tiny shapes under the main entrance. “If you get lost, follow the arrows.”

“I won’t get lost,” Sam says.

“Uh huh.” Natasha caps her pen, returns it to her pocket, and tugs Sam’s sleeve down again. “You ready?”

“Ready as I can be.” Sam reaches behind his back and pulls the gun out of the waistband of his jeans. “You?”

“Yeah,” Natasha says, too brightly. “It’ll be fun.”

It’s not fun. There is no Barnes here, but there are a lot of underground rooms, and those rooms have a lot of outdated underground HYDRA equipment, and that HYDRA equipment has underground HYDRA agents. Their blood doesn’t exactly run in rivers, but it’s on Sam’s hands - Sam’s and Natasha’s and even Steve’s - and it never feels good. Sam has killed people, but that doesn’t make it any easier, to be standing above them, gun in hand and bullet casings on the floor, watching the life flicker out of their eyes. He doesn’t feel remorse so much as nausea in the back of his throat. Steve looks about the same.

“Barnes isn’t in here, either.” Natasha’s voice crackles to live over the comms. “Upper story is clear.”

“Lower basement is clear too,” Steve says. “Seven casualties, all HYDRA.”

“Recon?”

“I’ll check. Most of this looks like storage.” Steve nudges what looks like a giant tripod with the toe of his boot, then aims a solid kick at it. “Nothing Hill’s team won’t want more than us.”

“Roger that. I’ll sweep ground again, just in case. Widow out.”

Steve smiles to himself, joylessly, and runs a hand through his hair. “She always does that, you know,” he says softly, to no one in particular. “Like I don’t know that the Black Widow is Natasha. I’m not Fury. She can just say ‘Natasha out’.”

“Maybe she likes Widow better,” Sam says gently.

“Yeah, maybe.” Steve rubs one hand over his face. “You check for files. I’ll see if there’s any data to back up.”

“Alright. Sam out,” Sam says. Steve gives him a small smile and wanders off to check the other rooms for anything higher tech than file cabinets.

Sam sighs, then shrugs off his jacket and hangs it on the tripod-looking thing and rolls up his sleeves. The building plan ripples with the tendons in his arms as he opens and closes empty file cabinets and desk drawers until finally, he writes the room off as a loss and sits on the floor. The bodies of the HYDRA agents are starting to stiffen a little and Sam hasn’t killed anyone in a while so he shies away from them and draws his attention to a point on the building doodle.

It’s a grossly oversimplified plan - clearly nothing that he wouldn’t remember from their meetings before - but Sam likes the tiny symbols. There’s a little hourglass (clearly Natasha) and a little star (probably Steve) and something that looks like an upside down crown. Sam supposes that it’s supposed to be wings, but he doesn’t mind. He rolls his wrist and pops the joint, then forces himself to stand up again.

“This room’s clear,” he says into his comm, pressing his finger to the plastic in his ear. “Nothing of use, just bodies. Speaking of, what do I do with–”

“Leave them.” The command comes, surprisingly, not from Natasha, but from Steve.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure there’s a clean-up crew we can call in,” Steve says. “Stark or someone. Hill. One of Tasha’s people.”

“Steve…”

“Do you have a better idea?” Steve’s tone is sharp and shaking slightly.

Sam holds his hands up to an empty room. “No, sir.”

“Alright. Then head out. I’ll meet you back at the car. Steve out.”

The slight static of the comm cuts out, leaving Sam standing amongst seven corpses, staring at the wall. He looks around at them all one last time, then turns and deserts the room. Captain’s orders.

Natasha is already waiting by the car by the time Sam makes his way out of the building. She’s leaning up against the side of the door, sunglasses on and missing her jacket. Sam leans next to her. The car is cold.

“You find anything?” he asks.

Natasha shakes her head. “Nothing of use. It might have been a decoy.”

“There’s plenty of crap in there.”

“Probably old. There was next to no challenge breaking into security either,” Natasha says. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was a distraction.”

“Well, I guess we’ll see if they make major news somewhere else.”

They stand side by side against the car, shuffling their feet every now and then, until Sam decides that the silence is too long. “You suck at drawing wings, you know.”

“Excuse me?”

“When you drew on my arm. Is that even a wing?” Sam teases gently. “It looks like stalactites.”

Natasha mercifully takes the bait and pretends to be offended. “Well, excuse me. I’d like to see you do better.”

“You’re on. You still got that pen?”

Natasha digs around in her jacket pocket and produces the pen and holds it out.

Sam takes it and pops the cap off. “Give me your hand.”

Natasha allows him to take her left hand in his, though her fingers twitch the first time the pen touches skin. Sam leans in carefully, drawing each line slowly, because there’s pride on the line and he’ll be damned if he gets beaten by an upside-down crown.

It turns out that birds and wings are the only things that Sam can reliably draw, because soon a complex feather pattern drapes itself across the top of Natasha’s hand. Natasha looks suitably impressed every time Sam glances up at her, and she nods in satisfaction when he finally lets her go.

“Well then. I stand corrected. Very nice, Wilson.”

“Damn right,” Sam says, triumphant. “Just don’t ask me for anything else. I do flying and that’s it.”

Natasha laughs as Steve emerges from the compound’s double doors, a stony look on his face. “I called in clean-up,” he announces. “They’ll be here in two hours. We don’t have to wait.”

“Okay, man,” Sam says. “Let’s go home.”

Steve opens the back door and climbs inside, lying across the entire back seat and projecting ‘please don’t talk to me’ very loudly with his body. Natasha shuts the door with her hip and takes shotgun, so Sam takes the keys from her and slides into the driver’s seat. Halfway through the drive back, Natasha’s winged hand reaches over and takes Sam’s bare one. She holds on until they get pull into the driveway. Sam feels the loss when she lets go to go take care of Steve.

~

Steve hangs up his phone and tosses it on the bed, then tosses himself down after it. He’s in Sausalito, on a ridiculous houseboat that SHIELD used to rent, doing busywork for Hill, who needs tech retrieval and apparently can’t get one of her side teams to do it. Steve doesn’t mind that much; he hasn’t been to California in a long time and it _is_ a little weird that SHIELD had business in a small and wealthy suburb instead of San Francisco itself or San Jose. He doesn’t even know when they were here. He doesn’t even really know what he’s looking for. He just knows the name and the meeting point of the woman who’s supposed to give it to him. She will have dark skin and a faint French accent. She will give him two cases. He will throw one away. It will be fine.

The thing is, Steve has been in California for a week and a half and there is no dark-skinned woman and no French accent and no cases, just the same waiter asking if Steve wants a refill on his coffee for the third time. Steve feels too agitated to stay at the houseboat, too uncertain of the area to venture out any further, too worried about getting recognized and plastered over the internet to do much of anything. The stagnancy is starting to drive him crazy. He misses New York.

Steve reaches over to his traveling bag and digs out a pad of paper and a pencil. The houseboat is pleasantly furnished, in a generic hotel sort of way. None of it provides any great burst of inspiration. He’s drawn half a dozen sketches of the water outside, more than a few busts of people at the cafe, and a couple of self-indulgent drawings of his hazy memories of Peggy before the ice.

Steve rolls to the side and grabs his phone from under him and opens up the image gallery. There aren’t very many pictures on his phone - it’s mostly for work and he likes his tablet better anyway - but the few that were saved and never deleted are mostly of Natasha and Sam, hanging out at Sam’s house or the Tower, with other Avengers popping in and out of the corners. Steve smiles fondly at his phone and props it up against his knee as he picks up his pencil again.

Sam is laughing in the picture he's chosen of them. Steve loves Sam's laugh - it's full bodied and veritably explodes out of him like he can't contain it. (Steve likes people like that. There aren't nearly enough of them these days.) Next to him, Natasha is grinning, wide and unreserved. She doesn't look like that very often. This picture must have been taken at some party at Avengers Tower - nothing makes Natasha smile like that like a team effort. There’s someone else in the background, out of focus. Maybe it’s Clint, or Thor. Steve thinks he sees blond.

He sketches out a few circles and lines for reference, then starts putting down details. Natasha’s hair parts off to the left in this picture, even though it’s back in the center now. Sam’s cheekbones are sharper now than they were whenever this was taken. They both look less tired than they had when Steve left New York two weeks ago. (Everyone does. Steve has given up feeling guilty for it. He feels sad but the rest of them refuse to let him take the blame for it and he lets them get it through his head that it’s not his fault, even as their captain.)

Steve stares at the picture until his phone automatically goes into sleep mode and contemplates calling one of them. It’s not particularly late in New York but Steve doesn’t know what their mission schedule is like when he isn’t around, so he doesn’t know if they’ll pick up. He refreshes the picture and draws an outline of Sam’s jaw line and Natasha’s eyes. Natasha wears less makeup than she used to. She smiles more, though. Steve can see genuine laughter in the lines of her face more often.

He lays down lines until Sam and Natasha take shape on his pad of paper. His shading is off and his proportions aren’t great, but Steve likes it anyway. It captures a certain vitality in both of them. It kind of makes him miss them more, but it makes him feel a little better about it.

The sun outside his window is starting to go down, which means it’s getting pretty late in Manhattan. Steve scrolls through his contact list and hovers over Sam’s name, but sometimes Sam goes to bed early and Steve doesn’t want to wake him up, especially since he doesn’t really have anything specific to say. And if Sam’s asleep, Natasha will probably be out with Clint, and they get to spend so little time together these days between reconnaissance and Bucky that Steve is reluctant to break them apart for no real reason.

Steve scrawls ‘Sam and Natasha’ under the sketch of the two of them and sets his pad aside. He knows he’s going home to them soon, but two weeks feels like so much longer than it used to, now that he has people to go home to again instead of just orders to report.

The more he thinks about it, the more isolated he feels and the more he wants to have Sam or Natasha with him.  And the more he misses them, the more he convinces himself he should leave them alone, that they have their own work to do and their own sleep schedules to catch up on and better things to do than listen to him complain about houseboats.

Steve looks at the sketch again and sighs. He doesn’t want to call but he supposes he could write to them. They don’t get a lot of mail anymore, now that Avengers Tower is their public relations address and JARVIS sorts fan letters from bills from junk from anything actually important. Everything goes to New York and the only things Sam really gets anymore are bills and the occasional card from his family. Writing to them seems safe enough.

He picks up the pencil again and starts putting down anything he can think of.

 _Sam and Natasha -  
_ _California was dull and uninteresting today. I drank coffee and got a sandwich from this deli a few blocks from my houseboat hotel, which is what I’ve been doing for the past week. The waiter is starting to recognize me. I don’t know how he hasn’t realized who I am, but he knows my credit card at least. We’ll have to burn it when I get home, probably. Maria wouldn’t like someone remembering.  
_ _The French woman hasn’t shown up yet and I’m beginning to get suspicious that something has happened. Maria hasn’t said anything and neither has Stark, but they could just not know. I don’t want to be out here for too much longer and I don’t want to be stuck out here if things go wrong. SHIELD always did have a funny way of sending you on missions, and they clearly haven’t changed very much since they dissolved.  
_ _I want to go back to New York. I don’t like being in California anymore. It’s so isolated from everyone we know. I kind of wish there was a west coast Avengers headquarters or something, but I guess Stark kind of had his house blown up a few years back, so there goes that plan. It would just be better if there was someone else here. It would be better if you were here._

Steve pauses and frowns at himself and scribbles out the last line.

 ~~_It would be better if you were here.  
_ ~~ _~~I miss you guys.~~  
_ _The coffee here isn’t as good as the cafe near Sam’s house. And the weather is cold all the time, only it doesn’t rain or snow at all. It’s just foggy. No one knows how to drive either. California can suck it, to be honest. I should go see a Dodgers game at least. I don’t remember where they transferred but I know it’s around here somewhere. I should tell Maria to come get her own damn case. I won’t but I should.  
_ _Call me when you get this, okay? Or text me. I want to make sure no one evil hears me complaining about coffee.  
_ _\- Steve_

Steve rereads the letter, then sets it down, then picks it up and rereads it again. There’s a reckless amount of classified information in this; Hill would kill him if it got intercepted. He could use his fake name, but if anyone was trying to track his mail, they would surely be smart enough to figure it out without him loudly proclaiming himself to be Captain America on the envelope. Steve shakes his head and rips the sketch off the top of the page, then tears the rest of it into pieces and gets up and flushes them down the houseboat toilet.

The next day, he goes out and buys a postcard of the Golden Gate bridge and pops it in the mailbox. 

 _Sam and Natasha -  
_ _The Bay Area is pretty but it’s no New York. Wish you were here anyway.  
_ _\- Steve_

~

Today is a bad day.

Today is a day where Sam looks at himself in the mirror and nearly breaks it because he can’t handle it; a day where Steve makes him tea because staring at a kettle is too hard; a day where every touch on his skin feels wrong and every noise is too loud and he would love nothing more than to sleep and sleep and sleep.

Sam is curled up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and a duvet, while Steve sketches next to him. Every now and then Steve will grumble to himself and switch to a new page, or Sam will take a sip of his tea, but it’s quiet and low-effort enough that Sam doesn’t feel like he’s about to crawl out of his own skin.

Sam glances down into his tea mug and frowns when he realizes it’s empty. He glances at Steve, and then the mug, and then Steve again, and sighs. Steve doesn’t seem to notice.

Sam sets his mug gently on the table and picks up one of Steve’s inking pens. He uncaps it with his teeth and writes _‘can you g’_ before Steve moves his hand in surprise. Sam flinches away, ducking back into the safety of his duvet cover, as Steve studies the writing on his arm.

“Can I g…get?”

“Shh.”

Steve’s eyebrows draw together. “What–?”

Sam presses a finger to his lips and holds up the pen.

Steve still looks confused, but he offers his arm back to Sam and Sam starts writing on it again.

_‘can you g et me more tea’_

Steve looks at his arm, and then at the mug, and then at Sam. He moves to speak, then seems to think better of it and grabs his own pen from the pile on the table.

_‘What kind of tea?’_

Sam gestures at the tag on the mug and Steve checks it, then nods and takes it back to the kitchen. Sam sighs in quiet relief and burrows back into his blankets, reveling in the dark and the warmth and the quiet. He vaguely registers Steve moving around in the kitchen, the sound of the sink running and the rushing of a kettle that hasn’t whistled yet and the quiet tear of the paper tag ripping free from its staple. Everything feels muffled. Sam is grateful that Steve knows how to walk quietly.

He’s startled by a mug being set down in front of him, and then a dip on the couch next to him as Steve sits back down. Sam expects to hear the scratch of graphite on paper start up again, but instead there’s just quiet, followed by a slight nudge.

Steve is holding his arm out, so Sam frees his head enough to read the words _‘Let me know if you need anything'_. He nods at Steve’s arm and Steve sets the pen down in front of him, next to the mug, and starts sketching again. Sam stares at his tea until the tendrils of steam start to fade, then reaches out and takes a sip. It's a little weak, but it's nice.

Steve doesn’t say another word to him all day, but by the time it gets dark, his arm is covered in mismatched words and phrases and Sam’s head is pillowed in his lap. Sam is asleep, snoring gently, and Steve uses his finest brush pens to draw thin, elegant feathers over the joints of Sam’s fingers. Steve bites his tongue between his teeth as he lays down layer after layer of black ink, rolling with Sam’s knuckles and the bones in his wrist and that slightly twisted scar on the back of his arm, until Sam’s entire forearm looks like a thin wing.

Sam wakes up like that as the sun starts to come up, with Steve slumped above him, pen dangling loosely from his fingers, fast asleep with his sketchbook on his knee. The world feels quieter now, not as harsh, and Sam decides as he flexes the feathers on his hands that he feels safer than he has in a long time.

~

“When I was younger,” Sam says. “I used to doodle on my hands with sharpies in class when I was bored. I always got in trouble for it. My mom said that I’d get ink poisoning if I kept it up.”

“That’s not even real,” Natasha says. “No one gets ink poisoning from drawing on their hands with sharpie.”

“I mean, all the ink is supposed to be non-toxic, right?”

“You won’t get ink poisoning unless you ingest it or it gets into your bloodstream somehow,” Natasha replies, like she’s reciting something she read once. “Urban myth.”

“I guess it’s the sort of things that parents tell their children to keep them from writing on themselves,” Sam says.

“My parents never said that,” Natasha says softly.

Sam licks his lower lip and twists his head to look at her. They’re lying in bed together, on top of the covers, both clad in sweatpants and hoodies. Natasha has her hands shoved into her pockets and is staring at the ceiling, eyes unfocused. Without the cover of teasing humor or fiery determination, Sam finds that she looks sad a lot.

“Alright, well, here. I’ll do it.” Sam pushes himself up off the bed, then goes over to his desk and pulls a thick pen out of his tiny pen cup. He sits back on the bed and holds out one hand. “Here.”

Natasha looks bemused, but she lets him take her hand anyway.

“Now, young lady,” Sam says as nasally as he can, drawing a big swirl on the back of her wrist. “You shouldn’t draw on yourself. It’s dangerous.” He draws the pen under her wrist and over the back of her hand, connecting the two lines together. “You’ll get ink poisoning, and then where will we be?”

Natasha covers her mouth with her free hand to hide her smile.

“Our best tactician will be in bed because someone drew a building on her,” Sam continues, pushing her sleeve up to her elbow. “Because her comms went out and the big strong sexy Falcon had to write her rendezvous points on her and he had to tell her where to go, and maybe she likes knowing that big strong Falcon knows what’s going on.”

The lines on her arm are crosshatched, moving down toward her elbow. Sam twists her wrist toward him and starts up a pattern of circles on the inside of her forearm.

“Maybe she likes it when the big strong Falcon takes a second and makes sure she gets out safe,” Sam says. His voice is soft now as he draws little stars in the centers of the circles. “Maybe it makes her feel safe and protected and cared for.”

Natasha is watching him now, rather than the pen. She gently pulls her arm away and turns it in the light. There are tiny shields on the inside of her arm, a pattern of hourglasses going down her ulna, little stars and diamonds and directionless spirals filling up the rest of the space

“I think you overestimate your subtlety, Wilson,” she says eventually.

Sam’s smile fades and he looks away from Natasha’s arm. “Yeah, well.”

“You’re better at it than I am.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah."

“How come?”

“Because I’m the one writing on you. Instead of the one saying why.”

“Yeah?” Sam repeats quietly. “Why do you do it?”

“Because I think it’s nice that you let me,” Natasha answers. “And because I feel better knowing… Even if I can’t talk to you, I can still talk to you. I can still try to keep you safe. I don’t know, it’s just nice...”

Sam feels her start to shut down, start to draw away, and he doesn’t follow her because he knows better than to press. Natasha goes quiet for a while and Sam does nothing more than upcap the pen again and bring her hand back toward him. He scribbles three words across her palm, then laces her black-striped fingers together with his and lies quietly next to her.

“I think it’s nice too,” he tells her, and squeezes her hand. She squeezes back. “I like it when you do it. I hope you don’t stop because I know you like it too.”

She shakes her head minutely.

“Okay, cool. Good.” Sam feels relief spread through his chest.

Natasha’s eyes are still trained on the ceiling, but she smiles anyway and leans her head against his shoulder and takes her hand away. She holds her palm up to study the words.

_‘I have you.’_

~

_‘went to work, be back at 6:30. make dinner? xx’_

_‘remember to pick up milk on your way home today -N’_

_‘Nat and I are making breakfast. We’ll save you some if you don’t wake up in time.’_

 

_‘you look nice today♡’_

 

_‘Look up that song we heard on the way to Clint’s apt, it’s driving me crazy.’_

 

 _‘venti caramel frappe ex whip_   
_tomato+mozzarella panini_   
_~~trenta passion fruit ice tea lemonade~~_  
 ~~ _what the hell is that?_~~  
 _PASSION FRUIT ICE TEA LEMONADE’_

 

_‘я люблю тебя ~~N~~ Наташа’_

 

_‘Call Stark+Hill tonight.’_

 

 _‘bread x2_   
_oj_   
_butter_   
_doritos_   
_bananas_  
 _toothpaste_  
 _spaghetti_  
 _hamburger_

_i left $40 on the table–that should be enough’_

_‘i need to go home_

_Okay, I’ll get the car.’_

_‘dinner’s in the oven, check it at 7:30 -N'_

_‘PTSD mtg. tonight at 7, make sure Sam showers and eats.’_

_‘REN1 COLUMBUS CIRC._   
_REN2 879 W 9TH AVE_  
 _REN3 903 8TH AVE_  
 _REN4 AVENGERS TOWER_

_BE SAFE’_

_‘please be please okay please be okay be okay beokaybeokaypleasepleasepleas–’_

 

_‘stop getting fucking hurt i will kick your ass back to the hospital’_

 

_‘Please come home soon.’_

~

“It’ll look great,” Steve says. “But only if you hold still.”

“I am holding still,” Sam grumbles. He tries to turn his head to see his reflection in the mirror, so Steve physically turns him back toward the wall.

“You are so not holding still, it’s almost unbelievable.” Steve splurts more white paint onto his palette and mixes a tiny bit of blue in with it. “Natasha, can you?”

“Yeah, got it.” Natasha gets up from the bed where she’s been sitting crosslegged, watching Steve, and gracefully crosses the room to plunk herself down in front of Sam. “Hi, Wilson.”

“Hi, Romanoff,” Sam answers with a smile. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Fancy yourself.” Natasha gestures to the window. “Nice weather we’ve been having.”

“Yeah, and how ‘bout those Mets?”

Steve makes an annoyed noise and taps Sam on the head with the handle of his paint brush. “If you gotta make me listen to you two, at least talk about a decent team.”

“What, like the Dodgers?” Natasha says with a sly smile.

Steve throws a paintbrush at her. She ducks, and it leaves a slight white slash on the wall.

“What are you doing now, Steve?” Sam asks. The smirk in his voice is evident.

“Well, right now I’m regretting asking you to be my canvas,” Steve says. Another cold stroke of paint layers itself on Sam’s back and Sam shivers. “Things on easels usually stay still.”

“Then go paint on an easel.”

Steve shrugs and dips his brush in the paint again. “Can’t capture everything on paper.”

“Oh yeah? Why's that?” Steve’s hand falters a little before sweeping down Sam’s arm with the brush.

“You know why.”

Natasha’s hands are wrapped around Sam’s, settling in his lap. Sam watches her watch Steve. She has that same soft, slightly sad expression on her face. “Tell me anyway,” Sam says.

Steve sighs quietly through his nose. “Because paper’s not you. Because if I put my ideas on paper, then they’re just drawings on paper, but if I put them on you…” The paint bottle cap pops and more white splatters onto the palette. “If I put them on you, it’s more… dynamic. More personal.” Sam can feel Steve’s breath on the back of his neck. “More beautiful.”

Sam nods his head a little and Steve steadies it again.

“Stop moving, you’ll crack the paint.”

“Sorry.”

Steve goes quiet again after that. The brush tickles as it skips down Sam’s sides, over the backs of his biceps, along the curve of his ribs. Sam squirms every now and then, and Natasha squeezes his hands tighter every time he does. She leans forward and presses her forehead against his. Sam lets out a breath and slumps forward into her. Steve grunts and stills Sam’s shoulders again, then starts drawing tiny curved lines back and forth across the expanse of Sam’s back. Each brush stroke feels like the lightest of caresses, leaving trails of cold nerves after them, like the brush is Steve’s fingers and he doesn’t always run hot. Like before the Serum, when his slight hands trembled in the winter around the wood pulp of a pencil. Like the ice he was born out of, but more tempered. Cool in application and then quickly warming up to him.

Much like Steve himself, Sam thinks.

Natasha’s breath rushes out at him and tickles his nose. It feels nice. Natasha doesn’t often this close to them - not out of distaste or discomfort, but Natasha is a more solitary person than they are. Sometimes she sleeps with one or the other at night, or curls up next to them on the couch, but usually she keeps a bit of space. Sam doesn’t think much of it anymore. They know Natasha, as much as she’s willing to let them know her. That’s just the way she is. It just makes the moments she lets herself get close to them better. Sam smiles a little to himself and Natasha rubs her thumb over his knuckle.

Steve sets his brush down and blows air over Sam’s back. Sam jumps a little, but then Steve’s hands are on his sides, stilling him as cool air rushes over his back. Sam feels the skin on his back tighten a little as the paint dries.

“How long do I have to sit here? My leg’s falling asleep.”

“Until it dries,” Steve says.

“How long is that?”

“Until I get tired of looking at you.”

Sam feels himself flush. Natasha has the tiniest of smirks on her face.

“Well, then, I guess I ain’t ever getting up, since there’s no one who wouldn’t want to look at this majesty,” Sam says, trying to inject some humor into his voice.

Steve’s soft reply of “yeah” makes his body feel warm.

Steve sits down next to Natasha and leans against the wall. His left arm has a couple of paint splotches on it, varying shades of the palest of blues and dashes of grey, and black pen marks under it. Sam studies the words out of the corner of his vision; it’s his and Natasha’s takeout orders from last night, when Steve volunteered to pick up dinner instead of paying for delivery, in Natasha’s neat, slanted handwriting. Sam reaches out and touches the ‘T’ of ‘tempura pork’. Steve bats his hand away.

“Let it dry.”

“Cap, yes, Cap.”

“Knock it off.”

It takes a while for the paint to fully dry. Sam feels like his skin is being pulled and wonders how dynamic Steve’s art can really be if it’s not actually allowed to move. Every breath he takes stretches at the paint a little more, so he tries to breathe shallow, to not disturb the lines or leave any cracks. Every now and then Steve leans forward and peers at the strokes, then shakes his head and sits back down again, shoulder pressed tightly against Natasha’s. Natasha draws her fingers over Sam’s hands, tracking the lines in his palms and the blank spaces where there used to be ink (a burner phone phone number, a false name, an address, a game of hangman, a tiny doodle of wings, a license plate, a crudely drawn penis, a shield with an hourglass in the place of a star, and most recently a list of real names to track down and interrogate). It’s all faded with soap and water and alcohol wipes but the memory lingers in the tips of Natasha’s fingers.

Steve taps his fingers over a few lines of paint, then nods to himself. “Okay. You’re dry, probably. You can go look.” He reaches down and carefully pulls Sam to his feet, and then he and Natasha trail Sam to the bathroom.

Sam holds his breath as he turns around, and then feels it all rush out of him at once. They all knew that Steve was painting wings, but Sam hadn’t understood what Steve meant by ‘dynamic’ until sees them in motion. The feathers are bright white and shaded with blue and grey and they roll with the tendons in his body as he twists from side to side to get a better view. Steve stands in the doorway, hands in his pockets, looking pleased with himself.

Sam spreads his arm and turns his head as far to the side as he can. The full spread of the wings is beautiful, intricate in design but still strong. Tiny cracks in the paint start appearing over Sam’s ribs when he stretches, but it just adds to the texture. He wonders if Steve planned that.

“What do you think?” Steve asks.

“It’s perfect,” Sam replies earnestly. He lets his arms drop and the wings appear to fold up against his back. “I love it.”

“You wanna wash it off now?”

“Nah.” Sam leans back against the bathroom counter and smiles at Steve and Natasha in the doorway. “I think I’ll leave it for a while.”

~

War is hell. Battles are taxing. And super villains and their robot armies are just plain annoying.

Natasha knows she has burns across her back, under her catsuit, and a large gash along her thigh, and her left arm is kind of numb in a way that feels absolutely wrong. She knows that there’s blood dripping down the side of her face from a particularly nasty crash into the wall, and that she’ll need to spend some extra time in medical when all of this is over. Medical is hell too. Maybe Clint can bail her out.

Tony is in her ear alternating between quips and actual useful instructions. She can see him coming down the street a few blocks away, a hoard of flying robots trailing in his midst. Every few seconds, another burst of light looses a metallic corpse and it falls to the ground in a burst of sparks. At least these minions don’t seem to be particularly sturdy.

“Bring ‘em in, Stark,” she shouts into her comm. “Thor can wipe a bunch of them out at once.”

Thor says something in agreement that is completely drowned out by the sound of his hammer against a metal head.

“I got about fifty headed your way,” Tony says. “I’ll do a fly-over but make sure you duck.”

“Roger that. Thor, get ready.”

Thor lands beside her, hammer in hand. “What are we doing?”

“One good lightning strike should ground most of them,” Natasha answers. “I’ll pick off strays.”

“Aye.” Thor steels himself as the cloud of minions draws closer.

“Let’s light these suckers up,” Tony says.

There’s a loud crack of thunder and then the cloud of robot bodies bursts into light. Natasha aims her guns at the head of the cloud, at the few bodies that are making it through the lightning storm, and fires off two–

_Black._

 

She wakes up to a pounding headache, made all the worse by the steady beeping of a heart monitor. The light that filters through her eyelids lets her know that it’s still daytime, probably, unless the lights in her room are particularly bright. The sterile smell of antiseptic burns her nose. It always has. Maybe Clint will bail her out soon.

Natasha does a quick mental check of her body. Her head hurts something awful - most likely a concussion. Bed rest for a while, at the least. Her leg stings and the skin feels grotesquely stretched. That must be the gash, all stitched up. Natasha momentarily feels annoyed that she’ll have to get her suit repaired, but Stark has the best tailors on call and the means to pay for it, so it’s really nothing more than an inconvenience. It’s not like the old SHIELD days of having to get refitted every time she tore something. Her back feels numb in a tingly sort of way, but just on the surface. Skin abrasions, probably, treated with antiseptics and numbing agents and bandages on top. She wiggles her toes, then her feet, then her legs all the way up to her hips. No paralysis. Superficial wounds, then.

Natasha flexes her right arm, cracking all the joints in her wrist and fingers, and then tries to do the same to her left, but her left arm feels heavy and even trying to move it hurts. She forces her eyes open, flinching away from the harsh light, blinking rapidly until the ceiling swims into focus above her. Whatever hospital this is has blindingly bright white ceilings and very pale blue walls. It’s kind of unnecessary, Natasha thinks.

She rolls her head to the left and sighs. Her arm is propped up in a low sling and wrapped in a cast. Her fingers are pale sticking out of the plaster, and it looks like two of them are taped together. That’s six weeks out of commission, at least, and then another two or three after the cast comes off to spend at the range and in the gym, trying to build her muscles back up. That’s more than she wants to afford, but there’s not much to be done about it.

Her room is small, but it’s private. A benefit of being an Avenger in constant danger, really. There aren’t any windows, but there is a television on the wall across from her. Someone put the remote on the left bedside table. Natasha huffs a strand of hair out of her face and rolls her eyes. The heart monitor beeps on.

She carefully lifts her left arm up out of the sling with her right hand and holds it up a little. The cast extends all the way to her elbow, but mercifully not past it. She guesses a severe fracture of the radius, but not a compound fracture. That’s nice. Compound fractures are awful to heal from.

She slowly rotates the cast as well as she can. There are messages and doodles all over it - clearly the other Avengers have already been to see her at least once. Tony has signed his name obnoxiously big, and Natasha feels sort of fond of him for it. Thor has drawn a hammer in black with crude lightning bolts coming out toward where it feels like the break is. His signature is as elegant as a prince’s would be along the handle of cast-Mjölnir. Clint somehow managed to procure a purple sharpie (Natasha suspects he just carries one in his quiver) and has drawn arrows all over her cast, pointing at her fracture and sticking out of other people’s names. She smiles fondly. Clint makes her smile even when he fails to bail her out of medical. Bruce is missing, but Natasha’s not surprised or concerned. She doesn’t know how long she’s been here, since there are no windows and she can’t see a clock anywhere, but Bruce is either still the Hulk or still recovering from being the Hulk. She’ll ask him to sign it later.

Someone (probably Sam) has drawn a lopsided shield and colored it in with a dying blue marker. There are lines extending from one end of it, making it look like it’s flying toward another arrow. Someone drew a black arrow cracked in half underneath the shield. Natasha imagines Clint’s face having seen that and laughs until her body protests too much and warns her to be still.

Next to the shield, Sam and Steve have signed together, with a faded blue arrow pointing inward. Natasha lifts up her arm to look on the far side of the cast, but there doesn’t seem to be anything specific there, just the lower, more extraneous loops in Tony’s name. She sets her arm down again and follows the blue arrow’s line of sight across her lap to her free arm. She flexes that one and turns it and lines of text reveal themselves to her on her forearm.

They’re upside down to her, so she twists her arm up uncomfortably and tips her head. A combination of pain medication and concussion makes it hard to focus and the words dance around a little unless she squints.

_‘-keupwakeupwakeupwak-’_

Natasha frowns. There are several repetitions of this, in what looks like Sam’s handwriting, and the ink looks a little faded. Maybe she _has_ been here for a while. Her phone is probably with one of the other Avengers, and her laptop is at Sam’s house. She has no way of alerting any of them that she is awake now.

There are more lines, what looks like a stream of consciousness, checking in throughout the day.

_‘Sorry about Stark.’_

_‘I’m sorry you got hurt.’_

_‘i’m sorry we couldn’t stop it’_

_‘Thor is sorry too, he thinks he might have hit you with a stray robot.’_

_‘they say you’re going to be okay. wake up and tell me you’re okay.’_

_‘some of your bruises are fading already’_

_‘Clint fell asleep at your bedside. I’m taking him back to the tower.’_

_‘your x-rays look awful.’_

_‘please wake up.’_

 Natasha reads each little phrase over and licks her lower lip. It’s definitely split and it tastes like iron. She bites down on it a little and sucks at the metallic tang and reads it all again. She wants to tell them that she’s awake, that she’s fine - that her body hurts but that’s nothing new, nothing she can’t recover from, and that she’s ready for one or all of them to beat the hospital staff into letting her go home or to Avengers Tower.

Her body decides that sleep is better than calling in a nurse, because suddenly she’s awake again, but this time with two other bodies in the room. Sam is in a chair in the corner of the room, head tipped back and a magazine open in his lap. Steve is sitting next to her bed, with his head folded on his arms and his back bent forward in what must be a terribly uncomfortable position. Both of them are asleep. It must be late.

She recognizes Clint’s jacket in the corner with a shoulder bag she’s pretty sure belongs to Bruce and wonders if they’ve been switching out, keeping watch in shifts. It’s a nice idea. She doesn’t mind it much at all.

There’s a pen dangling loosely from Steve’s fingers. There often is, these days. Natasha turns her arm over and finds a small pattern of triangles on the inside of her wrist. Steve probably got bored and didn’t bring something to draw on. That’s okay too. Natasha doesn’t mind being a canvas.

She carefully wiggles the pen out of Steve’s fingers and uncaps it with her thumbnail. Steve is still wearing his jacket but his hands are visible under his messy blond hair. She balances her hand with a pinky pressed against the bed rail and writes _‘I’m okay’_ along the rise and fall of his tendons.

Then she presses the call button and summons a nurse so that they can all take her home.

~

Steve lies face down on the bed, shirt off and sweatpants riding low on his hips, head pillowed on folded arms. There are cartons of chinese food with chopsticks stabbed in on the bedside table. The lights are low, dim but not too dark to see. Sam sits on Steve’s right and Natasha sits on his left, her elbow propped up against his ass. Sam’s iPod is set in its dock, playing something on shuffle. None of them are really paying attention.

Sam hands Natasha a pen and Natasha smooths her palm over a black space under Steve’s shoulder before she presses ink to skin. Steve closes his eyes as she writes slowly, mouthing letters as they appear on his back. Natasha watches her own hand intently, creating each letter perfectly like it’s its own work of art. Then she sets the pen down on Steve’s back without putting the cap back on. “What do you think?”

Steve rolls his shoulder and hums. “I know there was a capital C, and a capital A, so that makes me think you wrote ‘Captain America’.”

“Guilty,” Natasha says. “I didn’t know what to put.”

“S’okay, it’s a good thing to write. It’s accurate enough,” Steve says into his forearm.

Sam picks up the pen. “My turn.” He rubs his thumb along the ridge of Steve’s shoulder blade before starting his slow lettering.

Halfway through, the corner of Steve’s mouth quirks up. “Sam, are you writing ‘the Falcon’ on my back?”

“Absolutely not,” Sam says, straight-faced, as he curves the ‘c’ around the bone. “Who would do such a thing?” Steve laughs and the ‘o’ is a little sloppy because of it, but it’s okay. Sam just passes the pen to Natasha and grins. “Nat, you should throw ‘Black Widow’ down there. Make it all even-like.”

Natasha shrugs. “Okay. Steve, see if you can guess what I’m writing.”

“I wonder what it’ll be,” Steve says drily.

Natasha sits motionless for a moment, then leans forward and starts writing in short, sharp lines between Steve’s shoulders. The lettering looks almost like old Russian propaganda writing and after the first few letters, Sam realizes that Natasha’s words _are_ in Russian. He thinks about reminding Natasha that she’s the only one of the three of them that can actually read the language, but Natasha looks serious and Steve looks calm so he keeps it to himself.

“Those don’t feel like letters,” Steve murmurs. His eyes are still closed. "They just feel like lines."

“All letters in every language are just a combination of lines,” Natasha shoots back.

“Mm, alright. Those don’t feel like letters I know.”

“You’re smart, Steve. You can read in languages you don’t know.”

“Oh.” Steve licks his lower lip. “Is that still ‘Black Widow’?”

“Not yet.”

Sam leans over and points at the first, finished word. “How do you say that?”

“It’s ‘chernaya’,” Natasha says.

“What does it mean?”

“That’s black,” Steve says. “Isn’t it? Chernyy is black, right?”

“Yeah,” Natasha replies. She sounds slightly surprised. “‘Chernaya vdova’.” She draws the last new lines of ‘widow’ and sets the pen down again on the small of Steve's back. “I guess you don’t really need to guess what it says.”

“I think it says ‘Black Widow’ in Russian,” Steve says.

"I think you might be right," Natasha says softly. "My old name."

"Do you like it?" Steve asks. "In Russian or in English?"

"I like it fine," Natasha says. "It's not inaccurate. But I think I like Natasha better."

Sam picks up the pen and writes in place of speaking.

Steve wiggles his hips a little. "Too fast."

Sam steadies his hand and obediently writes slower. Natasha reaches forward and pets Steve's hair, scratching lightly with her fingertips. Steve hums and Sam feels it all the way through his pen. He lets the tip hang on the last letter, then underlines it with a flourish and hands Natasha the pen. “What’d you think?”

"I got 'here' and 'you'," Steve says. "And something in the middle that I missed."

"Pay attention," Natasha orders. She turns the pen over and traces over each mark with the cap end. Steve holds very still. "Get it?"

"I didn't get it," Steve says quietly.

"It says 'we're here for you'," Sam says. He looks at Natasha. Natasha is looking at Steve. "Both of us."

"Both of you," Natasha clarifies.

"Both of you," Sam repeats.

Steve opens his mouth, but nothing really comes out. He seems to think about it for a moment, then closes it and nods resolutely.

"It's my turn," Natasha says. She turns the pen over and the tip hovers over Steve's left side for a second before it presses down. Sam rests his plan on Steve's right shoulder as he watches her write. His stomach tightens a little as her letters turn into words - maybe pointlessly. She's not saying anything they don't know, but it's stark as written word in a way that it isn't murmured to a sleeping body or shouted in the heat of battle when no one else can hear.

Natasha finishes and caps the pen and sets it down on the bed. She stares at the words like she didn't write them. "Do you know what it says?"

"Yeah." Steve's voice is unusually timid.

"Do you?"

"Yeah. But I want to hear you say it."

"The point of writing is that we don't have say it," Natasha says. She looks lost again, almost scared. Sam is so tired of seeing her look scared.

"No, the point is that we have writing when we don't have anything else," Steve counters. "And right now I have you two here right now and I want what you have to say to be on my skin, but I want to hear you say it too."

Natasha runs her fingertip over the words. "We love you, Steve.”

Steve lets out a shivering breath like he’d been holding it and the muscles in his back flex. “Sam?”

“Yeah, man, we love you,” Sam says. His voice feels too rough for the statement. He says it anyway. “We love you.”

“Yeah,” Steve echoes. His eyes are closed and he turns his head so his forehead presses into his forearms.

Natasha moves the pen to the head of the bed and shifts herself to lie flat along Steve’s back. She wiggles her arm under Steve’s chest and Steve reaches back to stroke at her neck. Natasha glances at Sam expectedly so Sam curls up on Steve’s other side, burying his face in Steve’s neck and holding onto the hem of Natasha’s shirt. Steve’s breath rushes across his forehead as he exhales.

“I love you too,” Steve says quietly. “Don’t think that I don’t. Don’t ever think that I don’t.”

“We know,” Natasha says.

“Sam?”

Sam closes his eyes as Steve’s eyelashes flutter against his cheekbone. “I know. We got you.”

Steve nods. “Okay.” He wraps one arm around Sam’s waist and tangles his fingers in Natasha’s hair. “As long as you know.”

~

There are, against Steve’s will, seven rifles trained on the door.

He, Sam, and Natasha are all standing in front of the door, so there’s no real danger of any of them firing any time soon, but Steve hates it anyway. They are unnecessary and too violent and will probably scare Bucky off if he sees any of them.

They're all crowded around the entrance to an underground HYDRA base that has been recently overturned. All trails on the Winter Soldier lead here like lines of smoke, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And where there’s fire, there is revenge.

Natasha slips her hand into Steve’s, and Sam does the same on his other side. Steve takes a deep breath and bounces on the balls of his feet a little. They’ve been looking for so long, following so many cold trails and ghost stories and lies and lies and lies. He doesn’t know what to do if this is it. If this is what he’s been chasing.

Natasha is on his left. “You can do this.”

_‘you can do it.’_

_‘you are so strong.’_

_‘you can do this.’_

_‘we believe in you.’_

_‘we will stick with you.’_

_'we love you.'_

_‘let’s do this.’_

Sam is on his right. “We got you, man.”

_‘we have you’_

_‘we will take care of you’_

_‘we will protect you’_

_‘no matter what happens, we’ll be there’_

_'you're not alone'_

_‘we’ll do this together’_

_‘let’s do this’_

Steve nods. “Thank you.”

_‘Thank you for being with me.’_

_‘Thank you for saving me.’_

_‘Thank you for loving me.’_

_‘Thank you for saving each other.’_

_‘Thank you for helping me.’_

_‘Let’s do this.’_

Around them, seven safety guards click off.

Sam squeezes Steve’s hand, then lets go and gently nudges him forward. Steve reaches out and pushes the door open and together, they walk into the darkness of the unknown.

~

The Soldier lurks in the dark corner of the living room, as much as he can lurk while wearing a pair of ratty sweatpants and an “I ♥ New York” t-shirt. Rogers and Romanoff and Wilson are all out of the way - Rogers and Romanoff are out doing Avengers work overnight and Wilson has retreated to the other side of the house to do… something. The Soldier keeps one eye on the door, but Wilson doesn’t come out. Perhaps he is asleep already.

The house is as secure as it’s ever going to be. It’s a tactically unsafe house and the Soldier is of the opinion that they should move, but the other three seem decidedly against leaving. It makes the Soldier grind his teeth but he complies with a curt nod and patrols at night, keeping tabs on all possible entrances and tactical weak points. He remembers that they are not without enemies.

The Soldier glances at the clock in the kitchen, and then down at his forearm again. He doesn’t like the ink on his skin but at the same time, he doesn’t want to wash it off. He hasn’t been told to and it feels like it could be important later.

In three different styles of writing:

_‘You are James Buchanan Barnes.’_

_‘Call us if you need anything.’_

_‘You are safe here.’_

Barnes rubs a metal thumb over the words and steals himself for a long night of watching.

 

 


End file.
